How Social media propaganda is manipulating your brain: Propaganda about propaganda

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Facebook selects different “trending news” items for men versus women

The Washington Post reports that Facebook selects news stories for you based on your sex, location, and what they believe they know about you. Facebook runs the world’s largest propaganda platform, whether they intend to or not.

The Washington Post did a survey:

To probe this issue, we conducted a nonscientific, self-selected survey of 117 Facebook users in 106 U.S. Zip codes, asking them to screenshot and submit their mobile trending module at three specific, random times over two days this week.

When the Post created two identical dummy accounts — differing only in their gender — Facebook showed the Yellowstone story to the female account, and showed news about gaming platform Steam and the new Grand Theft Auto game to men

“Liking” a sports team page, meanwhile, is a one-way ticket to the ESPN filter bubble: Numerous fans in our survey were served a slate of relatively unpopular sports updates, to the exclusion of even major news stories that actually trended more widely across the site.